In the past two years, the focus of digitalization in manufacturing companies has gradually shifted from robotization, the Internet of things, automated lines towards completely different processes. The increase in cost, the departure of familiar suppliers and the emergence of new competitors, fluctuations in demand force production to pay attention to sales. Today’s digitalization in the industry is the introduction of CRM systems, building communication with customers, controlling transactions and integrating sales and production into a single transparent circuit.
What production looks like with a built sales process
You can have an excellent workshop, modern equipment and qualified technologists, but if the sales process is not built, the company loses money. Customers leave because they take a long time to respond, and transactions hang up because no one controls the stages.
Let’s take a real example – an ordinary concrete factory. It seems that the production is technically simple, not multi-stage: we received an order, completed it, and shipped it. However, in practice, the company systematized and digitized everything to the smallest detail.
Sales funnels: each lead in its place
Such a plant has five different sales funnels at the same time:
- Lead qualification funnel: someone calls with a question about the cost, someone writes to the messenger about the types of concrete, someone needs delivery to a remote area.
- Short deals on typical items: accepted an order for what is available, received payment, shipped, sent.
- Non-standard products to order: you need to prepare individual forms, a special composition of concrete, separately calculate the timing and cost, control production.
- A new product line for a single CA with its own manufacturing process and individual quality control requirements.
- Tenders: long approvals, a ton of documents, several levels of decision-making.
Each of these funnels lives according to its own laws, has its own terms, its own responsible person and its own economy. The company was able to standardize sales only after the introduction of CRM, which became a single center for managing all these processes. However, for CRM to work, you need to ensure the flow of incoming requests and control over them. This requires telephony and messaging channels.
Telephony: every call becomes a deal
In the same concrete plant, several telephony circuits are connected. There is the main city number from the site, customers come to it who have found the company through a search. Each manager has a separate corporate mobile number from which he communicates with clients. Internal office telephony is also connected: each employee has a device with his own internal number on the table.
All these channels are integrated into CRM. Any incoming call to any of the numbers automatically creates a new request or is linked to an existing deal.
Messengers: all correspondence is stored within the company
The next step is to integrate messengers with CRM. Most of the communication is now in chat, but if managers are allowed to communicate with customers from their personal numbers and devices, some of the data may simply be lost. Therefore, correspondence in instant messengers should be tied to transactions.
At the concrete plant, for example, a service was connected that redirects all messages from open instant messengers directly to the system. Dialogs are linked to the transaction, and if the client in the correspondence asks, for example, to change the delivery time or order volume, this information will not be lost.
If there is an AI assistant in CRM, as, for example, in Bitrix24, it will automatically recognize important data from correspondence, enter them into the system and set the manager a task or reminder. As a result, each contact with the client becomes transparent and documented. Not a single appeal disappears, it does not drown in personal correspondence of managers.
Security: customer base protected
The integration of all communication channels in CRM also solves the problem of data security. If managers communicate with clients from their personal numbers, and keep contacts in their own phones, the company loses control over the most valuable asset – the client base. In a properly configured CRM, access rights to client data and transactions are clearly regulated. The manager determines who sees which deals, who can edit, who can only view. Most importantly, who can upload data from CRM. This option should be available only to a very narrow circle of people. In a properly configured system, the manager sees only his clients, his deals and contacts necessary for communication. You won’t be able to download the entire database or transfer it outside.
Why CRM is not easy to implement, but it is necessary to customize
CRM with connected telephony and instant messengers is just a transaction accounting system. It fixes the fact of the transaction, but further processes on it remain opaque. Without additional customization, the system cannot answer the manager’s question about how much the order actually costs, or the customer’s claims about why it was not completed on time and at what stage the delay occurred.
In order to achieve transparency, you will have to build new processes and translate them into numbers. For example, change the process of calculating the value of the transaction or oblige the design department and production to mark their stages of work in the transaction so that the manager quickly receives the current status of the order being executed.
Let’s consider a few common examples.
We automate the calculation of production costs
Manufacturing companies often use self-written solutions to calculate deal values, such as complex tables with dozens of parameters and conditions. The manager opens the template in tables or Excel, drives in the order data, receives the cost and sends it to the client. However, the head of the sales department sees only the final figure, not the details: pledged materials, man-hours, margin level. The manager has to take a screenshot of the calculations and attach it to the deal in CRM. If the client asks to change the parameters, you have to recalculate everything again, attach a new screenshot to the deal, etc…
In one of our projects, we faced the same story. Managers counted the cost of the order in Excel, manually transferred to CRM, and the management had no control other than the final figure. We decided that the calculator should live inside the deal. The company worked at Bitrix24, so we implemented a calculator on smart processes. This is a flexible constructor within CRM that allows you to create your own card for any business task with its own fields, stages and access rights without programming.
We have made a separate button in the deal card that starts the smart process – opens the form to fill out production parameters. The manager specifies the quantity of consumables, the set of necessary operations. With deeper integration of processes, some of the parameters can be automatically tightened from reference books or specifications received from the client. The manager clicks the “Save” button, and the calculator instantly gives not just the amount, but a complete breakdown indicating the cost, margin, man-hours and costs for payroll and material consumption.
All these fields are automatically pulled into the deal. The manager sees what the final cost has come out of, estimates both margins and cost. The manager sees only the amount that can be called to the client.
If the client asks to change the number of products in the order, the recalculation takes no more than a minute, the story is saved in CRM, and no fuss with screenshots is required.
All variables – cost of materials, work of each specialist, equipment rental – are stored inside CRM. If prices for raw materials or consumables change, it is enough to change them in the system, and from now on, the calculator will read the cost of orders in a new way.
And the last touch: you can configure the automatic sending of the calculation to the client – in the messenger or by mail. Not only the final price, but also the decoding by materials, works and stages.
We put in order purchases and tenders
The procurement process is a separate pain for manufacturing companies. The need to order raw materials, consumables or office supplies arises from different departments. An employee writes an application to the mail of the tender department, it is sent to the manager for approval, he answers – approves or asks to revise. Letters fly back and forth, get lost in “incoming” and “sent,” and often none of the participants understands at what stage a particular application is. The head of the tender department does not see the big picture: how many applications are in work, where coordination has hung, who is slowing down.
When a company grows, and the number of tenders exceeds several hundred a year, a clear process is needed that will allow to meet deadlines, store all information on the tender in one place, and ideally also analyze the work of the department.
This task is easily solved using CRM. First, the process itself and its conditions are described, then a funnel for purchases is created, and the process is transferred to Bitrix24.
For example, in a tender company, only purchases worth more than a million rubles are made – this is the first rule that is checked automatically when a request is created. If the amount is higher, CRM starts a multi-step process:
- the application goes for approval to the financial department, then to the head of the department where it came from;
- the agreed task is received by the head of the tender department, who appoints a specific contractor;
- the contractor collects the terms of reference and the commercial proposal, sends them for verification to the initiator of the application, and after its confirmation, the tender goes to the external site;
- when the tender is played, the performer returns to CRM, sums up, fills in the brief;
- the initiator receives a task to sign a contract with the winning supplier, the contract itself is saved in CRM;
- upon completion of the work, the tender goes into the archive.
With the process set up, hundreds of tenders a year turn not into chaos, but into a controlled conveyor. The company receives a common base of tenders: all technical specifications, commercial proposals, contracts are stored in one place. The manager sees at what stage each tender is, where the delay occurs and who is responsible for it.
The system also records how long each tender lasted from the moment the application was created to the signing of the contract: you can always analyze which of the employees closes tenders faster and who more often has difficulties.
We control the production process directly in the transaction
In many production companies, the same problem occurs: the manager received an order, sent an application to the workshop, and then uncontrolled waiting sets in. There are approximate manufacturing dates, but how the process is actually going is unknown. He learns about the production delay after the fact, when the shipment did not take place, because the order is not ready. This is followed by excuses to the customer, late fines and lost trust.
You can integrate CRM with production IT systems to get statuses automatically, but it is usually difficult, long and expensive. It is much easier to develop a new process, which will include not only sales managers, but also designers, technologists, and shop managers. Their task is to fix key stages of production in the transaction card, for example: put into operation, re-order materials (+5 days to the production date), transferred for assembly, ready for shipment. Each company determines the set of stages and statuses itself, focusing on what the sales manager needs to know for an honest dialogue with the client.
Technically, this task is easily implemented by the tools of the CRM itself, for example, in Bitrix24 you can use the smart processes already mentioned above.
When production is required to update statuses, the manager has a transparent picture. He sees that the order is delayed at the stage of re-ordering materials, and can warn the client in advance, offer a partial shipment or replacement. After the completion of the transaction, it is easy to analyze where the deadlines are most often broken, which contractor fails, and which one, on the contrary, helps out.
Transparent and efficient work of the sales department in a production company becomes possible when CRM is not just “delivered and forgotten,” but is built into the real processes of the company and adapted to the specifics of the business. Therefore, the choice of a solution for digitalization of sales should take into account not only the cost or ease of implementation, but also the possibility of refinement, customization for their own processes. Convenient internal customization tools, up to the possibility of vibe coding without the participation of developers, become not just a priority, but a prerequisite for choice. Business is changing fast and the system must keep up.
By Alexey Pushkin, founder of PushkinBit